and the initial faith which enables men to be thus
accepted would normally, in those he is thinking about, have preceded
baptism, as in his own case, or that of Cornelius, or of the eunuch.
Who can doubt that the faith of St. Paul's conversion is what enabled
God to accept him, though it remained for him, as for other men, to
'wash away his sins' by being 'baptized into Christ[41]?'

May we not truly say that deeper and maturer study of St. Paul has for
us undercut and antiquated the theological standing-grounds of the {41}
sixteenth century, and substituted for them something both truer,
completer, and freer?

iv.

It only remains to make more emphatic what has been already suggested,
that the Pauline doctrine of justification is of much more than
antiquarian interest. We do not, as has been already shown, get rid of
the 'danger of thinking to be saved by works' because we are not, like
the Pharisees, abandoned to ecclesiastical observances. All moral
codes or standards, sanctioned by a society or class and involving no
more than a limited liability, come under the moral category of 'works
of a law.' They all are apt to leave men as independent of God as the
Pharisees, and as resentful of the fuller light. The late Master of
Balliol expresses a characteristic opinion that the notions of 'legal
righteousness,' or of 'the pride of human nature,' or 'the tendency to
rebel against the will of God, or to attach an undue value to good
works[42],' are 'fictions as applied to our own time[43].' But {42}
this is surely lamentably untrue. Men all round us dread the idea of
committing themselves to God. They do not know how far it will carry
them. They are like would-be soldiers who should refuse to enlist till
they had had some assurance as to the extremest risk that their service
might involve. Thus, because they cannot get this assurance, they will
make no beginning of the life of real faith. They live by a limited
code which retains their independence for them. If they are also
ecclesiastically minded, the 'legal righteousness' always involved in
this sort of morality becomes even outwardly more like that of the
Pharisees, and it is not very uncommon among churchmen. But the whole
habit of mind, inside or outside the area of professed churchmanship,
has its root in what is properly and profoundly human pride and the
false clinging to independence of God. This 'pride of life' seems to
be almost more dangerous